Suchergebnisse

Recent protests on the persisting influence of Belgium's colonial past on contemporary society begs the question as to how we should understand the recent social movement around decolonization. Current research into postcolonial issues is predominantly qualitative and text-based. This research, however, takes a quantitative approach to investigate widely held attitudes among citizens. In doing so, it maps the attitudes in Belgian public opinion concerning decolonization measures relying on a representative survey conducted among the Belgian population (N = 1026). Based on attitudes of Belgian respondents, we propose a conceptual distinction between additive measures (whenever an addition is being made) and subtractive measures (which implies a removal). The data shows that there is no polarization on this issue in Belgium, but that the majority of the respondents are willing to support decolonization measures. Three sets of hypotheses on the effects of knowledge, age, and party preference are tested to examine these attitudes. Both knowledge and party preference have a significant influence on the support for decolonization in general, while age only has a significant effect for subtractive measures. The implication of this research is that there is a need for a dialogue between different approaches to study decolonization.

The Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 placed issues of the colonial past and structural racism more prominently on the political agenda in Belgium. The politicized debates around coping with this past and historical accountability stand in stark contrast to what was previously described as a historical taboo around Belgium's colonial past. Whereas any public debate on this past was previously systematically avoided, contemporary politicisation seems to question whether we can still speak of a colonial taboo in Belgium. This article studies the impact of the politicisation of the Belgian colonial taboo on different levels using text analysis of news reports, discourse analysis of parliamentary questions and survey analyses of Belgian public opinion. Despite increased media coverage of Belgium's colonial past, we conclude from the survey analyses that colonial amnesia – ignorance about the colonial past – persists in Belgian public opinion. In contrast, parliamentarians take an unequivocal condemnatory position towards the colonial past but do so with a discursive distinction between this past and the contemporary after-effects of Belgian colonialism. Thus, despite the partial recognition of the problematic colonial past, the historical taboo is not fundamentally questioned.